V.F. Portrait

David Boies and Theodore Olson

THEY FOUGHT THE LAW David Boies and Theodore Olson in the lawyers’ waiting room at the New York State Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, First Department, in New York City.

In one of the most unlikely partnerships in civil-rights history, David Boies and Ted Olson teamed up to fight California’s ban on same-sex marriage— all the way to the Supreme Court. A year after their victory, which the superlawyers have chronicled in a new book, Lionel Barber recalls what brought the political opposites (and onetime combatants) together.

They are America’s odd couple: two superlawyers, one Democratic, the other Republican, who teamed up to overturn Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage, in a Supreme Court ruling which made civil-rights history.

David Boies and Theodore B. “Ted” Olson are living proof that bipartisanship is not (yet) dead and buried in Washington. Back in 2000, they faced off in Bush v. Gore, which decided the election. Nine years later, they set aside their party allegiances in favor of a common principle: that equal rights for gays and lesbians to marry was not a liberal or conservative issue. It was a basic human-rights issue.

Last summer, I heard firsthand the story of their unlikely partnership. A group of us were cruising off the Amalfi coast, one of the most stunning seascapes in the Mediterranean. Good wine (another common Boies-Olson cause) flowed; so did the post-lunch conversation. A fellow passenger prodded Ted to tell his story. Why Ted, not David? Because Ted is a true conservative, a former solicitor general under George W. Bush. His journey in defense of same-sex marriage was never going to be straightforward.

Ted spoke in a rich baritone which commanded attention. Republican friends found his decision hard to swallow. He himself had been initially wary—until he met one same-sex couple in particular and felt their pain in the face of discrimination. He used that word, “pain,” several times. I remember, too, his closing argument: “These are people who want to participate in life as citizens the way the rest of us do.”

David’s account was more matter-of-fact: dispassionate analysis mixed with remorseless logic and a famed iron will. This is the man who overcame dyslexia to become one of the top trial lawyers in the country, the successful defender of CBS in the Westmoreland libel case, the scourge of Microsoft, and a noted philanthropist, who has endowed nine chairs at universities from N.Y.U. to Yale.

Somehow David and Ted have found time in their packed schedules to write their story in a new book—Redeeming the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality. (HBO’s documentary on the trial, The Case Against 8, is also out this month.)

Lawyers often get a hard time in America. But in the case of same-sex marriage, so long a taboo, two distinguished attorneys turned out to be way ahead of the politicians. That’s a tribute to David and Ted—and to the vibrancy of American democracy.